


The Somnambulists

by Goldmonger



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Brother Feels, Brotherly Love, Gen, Nightmares, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Slice of Life, but the saddest kind
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-04
Updated: 2020-10-04
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:42:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,320
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26806786
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Goldmonger/pseuds/Goldmonger
Summary: This is what centuries of trauma does to you. A blanket fort with your forty-one year old brother becomes paradise.
Relationships: Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester
Comments: 19
Kudos: 111





	The Somnambulists

**Author's Note:**

> Set at some point during seasons 14 & 15.

Sam wakes to the taste of blood in his mouth.

It’s familiar. It’s metallic, salty, like human blood normally is. His own blood, he means.

He finds the bathroom in a haze, his dripping layer of sweat cooling and making him shudder. He vomits twice into the toilet, so used to the act by now that his gut barely heaves, the acid sour at the back of his throat.

When he’s done, red droplets speckle the bowl, the toilet seat, even a number of floor tiles, leading breadcrumb-trail style from the doorway to him. He spits again. He breathes. He tongues the gash in his cheek, where he’d bitten so hard he’d torn a shred of skin away, and wonders if it’s bad enough to merit a dab of Orajel. That’s if they even have any of it left. Their first-aid kits are plundered so often for road use that they’d be useless if they actually needed them in an emergency. It’s stupid of them, Sam thinks. Anything could happen.

He coughs on impulse, to clear his throat, and blood sprays on the wall opposite him, dripping warm and viscous with saliva down his chin. He wipes his jaw roughly. Once upon a time he might have licked it, just to be sure it wasn’t going rancid, hot and sickly sweet with sulphur. Once upon a time he would have done a lot of things.

“Jesus.”

He returns to the bathroom and the current year when he’s grabbed, gently, by the shoulder. Dean is there, peering all over his face for something – an injury, Sam figures, after a while. He allows himself to be patted down, watching Dean watch him, resisting the urge to poke at Dean’s crow’s feet and forehead creases. At times like these he’s always reminded that his brother is getting older. It’s a tireless kind of relief, like when he wakes up in control of his own limbs.

“You repainting the place?” Dean murmurs, retrieving a washcloth from the cabinet beside the sink. Sam catches a flash of the inside as it’s opened and shut, of the rows of antibiotics and antipsychotics and antidepressants, all the anti-everythings they could think to steal whenever it was convenient. _You never know_ , they told each other. _You never know_.

Dean has wet the washcloth under a stream of icy water. He’s cleaning Sam’s face, his hands, the wall, the toilet, the floor, in that order. He keeps rinsing the cloth, squeezing it, attacking the stains with that unfailing grip.

“Bit myself in my sleep,” Sam croaks, by way of explanation. He clears his throat again, not so harshly this time. “Nightmare,” he adds, pointlessly.

Dean nods, tossing the washcloth into the sink. “I’ll go at this with the Lysol tomorrow, clean it properly. Come on.”

Sam gets up and follows his brother. He thinks he should protest, tell Dean that he knows he must look like Hell (he hasn’t checked the mirror – he never does, not when he’s like this – when he can’t be certain that’s him looking back, grey skin, lank hair, blank expression and all) but he’s fine. They should both get some sleep. It’s late.

He continues to pad along the bunker hallway, Dean shuffling in slippers, Sam cold in his bare feet.

Dean looks a little like Hell himself, Sam notes. That’s the thing, really. They can hide from themselves but not each other. It’s a blessing and a curse.

They arrive into the Fortress of Dean-itude (a title that beats ‘Solitude’, Sam figures – at least this includes him), and Dean starts pulling the La-Z-Boys apart from one another, spacing them at a carefully calculated distance. Sam knows it’s a ritual, an important part of the process, so he sits cross-legged beside the shelves of records and avoids picking at a stinging hangnail. Old wounds can be made worse with meddling, he knows this. John Winchester told them, don’t fuck with your scabs. They’re ugly and uncomfortable but they’re healing you.

“Give me two minutes, all right?” says Dean, and Sam refocuses, shoves his hands into each armpit. He gets cold pretty easily.

“I can help,” he says, but it sounds faint even to his own ears. Dean doesn’t reply, simply lays a hand on his head on the way out of the room, not quite tousling his hair. It’s an ancient and inherited gesture, one that proves he’s there, he’s solid, and he’s coming back. Sam should be inured to this tactic by now, truly, but it still works on him. There have been so few certainties in his life, so little he can recall with clarity, so much of his memory corrupted by outside influences. He relies on what he thinks is real.

_I’m safe with soft rock on the radio. I like exercising this body because it feels like I own it. I know my brother’s hands._

There’s a rustling at the doorway, and Dean is there with an armful of bedsheets, a duvet folded on top of the pile, and a rug rolled up on top of that. It’s teetering dangerously.

“Dude,” he chides quietly, taking the rug and the duvet, setting them on the floor. “You could’ve tripped.”

“Hunter reflexes,” retorts Dean, with the flash of an old grin. He doesn’t break that one out much anymore, Sam thinks. Used to be every diner waitress, police chief, and secretary caught the full force of that thing.

Sam reaches out and flicks him between the eyes. Dean almost retaliates, but hugs the bedsheets to his chest just in time.

“Rude,” he drawls, wobbling again.

“That’s me,” Sam says after a beat, and he takes some of the sheets. The easy banter tends to come back in fits and starts after the dreams he has, like the sensation of having skin over his flesh or speaking English instead of Enochian. Slowly, but surely. At least so far.

They push the foosball table up behind the armchairs, and Dean drags over the mini-fridge he’d set up only a few weeks earlier, positioning it in front of the television. It’s a fairly well proportioned foundation, all the more so now that they’re using the Fortress instead of the library. Dean moved them here because it was ‘closer to their bedrooms’, but Sam remembers shivering in that wide open space where all manner of beings had sat and argued, had fought them and made them bleed. Dean had seen his twitching, he knows, and had abruptly changed locations. The library was fine for research. Not for nights like this.

Dean starts throwing out sheets pell-mell, letting Sam do the harder job of arranging them over the chairs and the table. Sam is practised by now at securing them, tucking the edges under the chair seat cushions, or alternatively tying them around the foosball table handles. Tonight he also closes the mini-fridge door on a few sheet corners, holding them in place, providing a bit more stability. When he’s done, the middle of the fort dips in a little, but it’s serviceable. It’s misshapen and not exactly right, but they’re used to that.

Dean has vanished while he worked, but almost the second Sam glances up to search for him, he reappears with another two duvets, two pillows and a glass of water. All balanced very carefully.

“Your throat must hurt,” he says by way of explanation, and Sam takes the glass off him as Dean begins setting up the blankets inside the fort. He drains the water. It’s lukewarm, and doesn’t burn going down.

“No beer?” he asks, collecting the duvet and the rug by the record shelves and joining Dean on the floor. He spreads the rug, flattens the blankets. Dean punches the pillows to fluff them. He always does it, punching and punching like they have faces.

“Too early,” says Dean. “Your delicate stomach couldn’t handle it.”

Sam rolls his eyes, and it’s not all performance. Dean’s grin is back, but it dims too quickly.

“Mouth hurt?”

“Nah. It just looks bad.”

“Can I see?”

He’s asking permission. He’s doing that more and more these days, and Sam isn’t so far gone that he doesn’t know what it means. He still gets the gruff rendition of “show me,” if he gets knocked about on a hunt, but late at night it’s different. It’s like Dean is aware the veil is thinner. Reality blends with memory and imagination, and he sees that Sam has to concentrate on being himself. A soul inside a body. Nothing and nobody else allowed.

“Yeah,” he replies, and tilts his head back, Dean reaching to pull up his lip like a dentist.

“That’s a big cut, Sammy,” mutters Dean, like he’s wrapping up a Sam many centuries younger, his knee split from falling. “You might need stitches.”

“It’s not bleeding anymore,” says Sam. “It just looks bad.”

Dean is eyeing him, tired and grim. “Okay,” he acquiesces, releasing him, though his hand slips to the side of his neck for a moment. Checking his pulse, maybe. “Okay.”

They smooth out the duvets over the rug, and align the pillows so that they’re almost between the La-Z-Boys. Dean lies on his stomach, Sam on his back. The sheets stretch out over and around them like a pale, translucent womb.

“You want me to turn out the lights?”

It hurts Sam’s eyes sometimes, when the lightbulbs flare like the Morningstar did, searing him with a white, unrelenting afterimage that doesn’t go away until he’s in pitch-black darkness. The light and the cold. They don’t belong together, really. They’re another few basic elements of the world that can get all twisted up and wrong when he wakes up, and some of him is still in Hell.

“I’m fine,” Sam says. He’s on soft bedding, his brother radiating warmth beside him. Speaking of which –

“How about you?” he enquires, his voice neutral. If Sam emerges from dreams in a near-fugue state, Dean is launched from them with fists flying. Sam has taken more than one black eye and bloody nose from trying to draw him away from whimpers, from jerking limbs in a pool of sweat and urine. It’s better to approach with caution.

“Fine,” Dean says automatically, then notices Sam’s raised eyebrow. “Really. I got a couple hours shuteye. I was heading for coffee when I heard you vandalising our bathroom.”

“Only a couple hours?”

Dean pulls a thread from the coverlet beneath him, and winds it around his thumb until it turns white. He leaves it too long, and Sam becomes anxious about his circulation. What a dumb way to lose a finger, he thinks, batting at his arm until the thread loosens, and the blood surges back. It must have hurt, though you wouldn’t know it by Dean’s face.

“Dreamed of Alastair,” says Dean, low enough that Sam has to strain to hear him. He sees Dean smile, mirthless, at nothing. “He used to talk up a storm. He’d say the worst things. The very worst things.”

“Lying fuck,” says Sam, so casually that Dean looks down at him and chuckles. It’s hollow, but it’s there.

“Guess so.”

“Dead fuck,” continues Sam, and the laugh grows a little fuller.

“Yeah. Damn right.”

They lie silent for a while, listening to Dean’s phone warbling out the entire discography of Journey. The bunker creaks and whines as it is wont to do late at night, echoing with machinery and rattling vents. They distinguish the familiar from the unfamiliar almost unconsciously. What sounds like home and what doesn’t has become very apparent to them lately.

“You good?” Dean says softly, about an hour in, when Foreigner starts playing. Sam realises he’s pressing against the raised scar winding across his palm.

“Sorry.” He curls his fingers away. “When things are nice, when my guard is all the way down, it’s – it’s just a habit. He’s not here.”

“Got it,” says Dean. He rolls over so he’s on his back too, then shimmies over so that his left side is against Sam’s right, burning hot on Sam’s chilled skin. “Also a dead fuck.”

Sam smiles.

“We should put up those dinky lights in here. You know those Christmas ones?”

“I think they’re called fairy lights.”

Dean scoffs. “Uh, no. That’s prissy.”

“Yep.”

“Shut up. They’re Christmas lights, right, I know that much, but we can sort of drape them around the place in here. And then we won’t need the lamps or whatever. It won’t be so bright all the time.”

Sam nods, the overhead bulb through the sheets like a small sun behind fog. “I’d like that.”

“Yeah?” Dean sounds inordinately pleased. “And we could get stands or tentpoles for this room, you know, make building this thing a bit easier –,”

“I mean,” Sam interjects, “I don’t mind setting it up on stuff already here. It’s… slapdash.” He shrugs, knowing Dean will feel the motion. “Like old times.”

Bleached cushions and scratchy motel sheets thrown over the divide between single beds, their gangly forms scrunched tight into the gap, the end blocked off with the seat of the only armchair in the room. There were no scary stories by torchlight, not that Sam remembers. There were tales of Gawain and the Green Knight, of John McClane and Luke Skywalker and every kind of hero that had ever kicked ass. His brother beside him, warm and living and the only really _real_ thing in the world.

Dean shakes his head, making sure Sam can feel it, nearly bumping their skulls together. “Build on what you got, I guess.”

“And keep going from there,” finishes Sam, and Dean prods him in the ribs, which incites a slapping war that dies down when Bob Dylan begins to croon, the song sorrowful, yearning. Dean turns on his side, sings along under his breath. Sam falls asleep to the sound.

Maybe he dreams again. Maybe it’s about something good.


End file.
